Wednesday, June 7, 2017

French Open 2017: Timea the Swiss vs. Jelena the Latvian

The French Open will have a first time winner on Sunday and it has come down to the final four - all very good clay courters - and all taking advantage of the absence of some of the marquee players.

Not to take away anything from these ladies, but they did sweep aside former #1 players (Wozniacki) and grand slam winners (Stosur, Kuznetsova) to get to where they are.

I have heard of Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia for sometime now but I never saw her play because cable TV only shows matches where Serena or Maria plays - and unless you play them - you will never air on tennis cable TV here in Asia.

She has a very good chance of making it to the final because I don't think she has any nerves to deal with! Anyhow, the semi-final stage is another beast altogether so it would be interesting to see if she would be as fearless as she was during her match against Caro.

Timea is no stranger to the semi-final stage of RG, so I am not at all surprised about her run. She was able to tame the beast which is the French crowd, who were prevented from supporting Kiki because of the blustering wind and the rain delays, not allowing the Frenchwoman any chance to rev them up.

It would be interesting to see the aggressive play of Ostapenko against the steady accurate play of Bacsinszky. As for me, I am more of a Timea fan since I was cheering for her when she played Serena here in the semi's two years ago (she lost).